Solar Tracker - 2
So, I finally got time (we got time) to move ahead with the design of the Solar Tracker. People have asked (/me points to ray|raven) me what is a solar tracker. In simple words, it is Mechanical SunFlower. It tracks the motion of sun and keeps itself perpendicular to the sun rays.
Finally, as I said, the development has begun. We debated on weather to use a stepper motor or normal DC motor and things like that. Finally decided to use either stepper motors or DC servo motors. We also decided to use a motor driver IC and not to build one ourselves. It was a wise move by the way. The motor driver circuit would have meant two things. One was the time factor and second was, ICs always work with minimum twice efficiency as compared to discrete circuits 
.
We spent about 1 hour making the PCB design of the circuit and called the man who manufactures them. It turned out that the man uses some other S/W (yeah yeah.. don’t give me ‘you should have enquired first’ thing… we were going to make it at home, but it went on to become very complex). So, we wasted that hour.We sent him the circuit and he is made it for us and we got the 2 boards from him.
Meanwhile, I made the boards fot +-12V and +-5V supplies at home. They are being etched at this very moment. Once it is done, I will be drilling holes and making the best power supply the world has ever seen… well I had to exxagurate it a bit to make the article interesting.. and receive comments 
Hopefully it will be built before the end of this week.
Posts in the series, Solar Tracker :-
- Solar Tracker - 1
- Solar Tracker - 2
- Solar Tracker 3
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 11:14 pm and is filed under College Life, Design, Electronics, My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
